Snoopy, on 01 August 2014 - 06:23 AM, said:
After I read your message I'm not sure if you understood my contribution or my intention. English is not my native tongue, so I may not choose my words in the correct form.
That DOES change things, so I apologize for misunderstanding what you had written.
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I have asked my questions to know what others think how we can obtain a balanced forces ratio between the factions (with a return to 3049), while staying true to the BT-lore.
Alright, if you're talking about in a fight between IS and Clan factions, the tabletop had it so the IS side would run with about 35% more tonnage on a side, for the simplest fix to the problem of Clan overpower, to bring the game back to a more or less even keel. For MWO, and the way the devs have built the game, I would say it's a ratio more between 1.25:1 or 1.35:1.
If you're talking about a balance between the number of Inner Sphere and Clan PLAYERS in the overall game, it's going to be impossible, and it was always going to be impossible, for Inner Sphere players to equal Clan players. The happy-shiny-twitcher tech was the destruction of this game from the moment PGI announced we were not going to get a game in 3015, but rather starting in 3049. Why? Because there are so many people, whether among the veterans of the BattleTech or MechWarrior games, or the people who want the biggest-baddest tech, even if it IS all munchkin-tech, and always has been, that even attempting to have even sides of IS and Clan, or higher numbers of IS players is laughable, at best.
Finally, if you're talking about getting a balance between House's Kurita, Davion, Liao, Marik, Steiner, the Free Rasalhague Republic, and Clan's Wolf, Jade Falcon, Ghost Bear, and Smoke Jaguar's, that still falls into the same territory as the previous paragraph, laughable. The most ardent fans of BT/MW are split between House's Kurita and Davion, while Steiner, followed by Marik and, at the bottom of the totem pole, Liao, have fewer fan numbers, though the fans seem to be more rabid. Finally, you have the FRR, who for this game are even more rabid, and not as small a faction as Liao and Marik; these are players who want to be on the front lines, to repel the Clans and try to keep the FRR, if they are able. However, the Clans are going to have the higher numbers, to be certain, and I believe the ratio will shake out to be, roughly, 66/34, or about 1.94:1 in favor of the Clans.
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Regarding short-term goal: you are wrong in the assumption that I support only short-term goals. It is exactly the other way around.
Then I stand corrected.
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I would like to raise the question : why should a customer spend money on MWO when PGI is known to change in-game conditions after sale of products. It is one thing to change something for balance reason, but it is a total different story to change key features of the game and changing the products you bought with money.
More importantly, PGI have a perfectly good set of development docs in Dev Blogs 0 through 5... why in the hell did they change them? Don't they realize that 99% of the community came here, purchased Founder's 'Mechs for exorbitant amounts of money -I've NEVER spent $80 on a game cover in my life!-, based almost solely off what was written in Dev Blog 0!?!?! What do we have? Almost NOTHING of what we were told -not promised, told- was going to be in this game. We were told, 'no coolant flush', we were told, 'no 3rd person view', we were told 'no Clans before Community Warfare', and now we're told, 'you're on an island'; all of these things are lies, we've actually been LIED to, and that's worse than changing little features.
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Doesn't such actions / reputation do more harm to the long-term revenue if the don't get communicated before?
Over the past few days, since the modules update, a lot of my friends have begun talking about leaving the game, permanently. I have tried, over the last year since I've been playing, again, to be positive, to tell people what I know, for the sake of giving them hope for this game, and I've been lied to over and over, again, by those people. One of my players put himself on an indefinite hiatus in late-May because of the declining state of this game. It is all about what money PGI can get, NOW, not about the millions more they would get from running this game long-term. There is no consideration for the consumer, period.
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I think we will have to agree to disagree on the aspect of appealing to BT/MW fans only. I do believe that the BT/MW fan base is huge, but not huge enough to run a online game (financial and number of players).
At one point, there were 25,000,000 players of the board game around the world, so are there numbers, yes. However, since the advent of Netmech 95 from MechWarrior II, there have only been an average of 73,000 players in the BT/MW community at any given time. This game is something of an anomaly, and there were enough of us BT/MW veterans, back then, to make the population swell to 550,000 in a matter of nine months time. If the game were developed for the BT/MW veterans, the way they said they were going to do it in the first place, the veterans would have built the community up to majestic proportions. The biggest mistake PGI made was that they did not do any sort of fund raiser, no Kickstarter. Unfortunately, as a result of that short-sightedness, games like Hawken, Star Citizen, any new MOBA, is going to do far better, because the game is being developed from the standpoint of the fans, who love the ideas these games have cultivated, and by those who are cultivating the ideas actually sticking to them, as opposed to PGI and IGP who have a few traditional investors who are ordering them to make money and build the game the way the investors want.
What PGI needs to do is drop IGP like a hot rock, throw a Kickstarter to pay off those who invested, including any interest that has accrued between the time the loans were made and now, and then build the rest of this game the way they said they would. I would stake the remainder of my miserable tiny life on the FACT that PGI would complete this game faster, they would do it more in-line with their own design docs, and it would make far more money in the end than it will as a result of investor pressures, now. No one person could give more than a certain amount for the Kickstarter, and no one person, or group of people, would have more control or say than anyone else. What PGI have done, here, is doom this game, and their own futures, to failure as a result of the misplaced actions they've taken from the outset. A monkey and two ducks with pencils could have managed this better than it's been managed.
The biggest thing we can all do is continue to vote with our wallets; do we keep them closed and stymie the corporate investors until they either have to shut the game down, or give into what WE want, in this community, which is what was outlined in Dev Blog 0 through 5, or do we keep spending after what the corporate talking heads want?
Edited by Kay Wolf, 01 August 2014 - 07:55 AM.
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